The Perception of “Live” Embarrassment: A Social Relations Analysis of Class Presentations

Abstract

Almost no emotion recognition studies have presented observers with episodes of both authentic and “live” emotion occurring in their natural settings. In contrast, in this study, students in various university courses judged the embarrassment felt by their classmates during presentations to their classes, and reported how they felt during their own presentations. The resulting round-robin data demonstrated that naturally occurring embarrassment can be reliably recognised by observers; audiences agreed about who was and who was not embarrassed, and their judgements were reliably correlated with the actors' self-reports of embarrassment. However, judgements of embarrassment are partly in the eye of the beholder as well; those who were more embarrassed by their own talks perceived greater embarrassment in others. In addition, experiences of empathic embarrassment emerged more from perceiver idiosyncrasy than from the objective behaviour of the target.